Novelist Joyce Carol Oates chronicles her tumultuous childhood in rural western New York State in her memoir, The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age. She shares memories of her first friendships and her earliest experiences with death, showing their influence on the woman and the writer she would become.

Event: Joyce Carol Oates will be speaking at Barnes and Noble on the Upper East Side, (150 East 86th Street) at 7 p.m.